Dwarfed by the Corinthian columns of the New York Stock Exchange's towering facade, Wall Street tour guide Tom Comerford opens a weather-beaten folder on a busy street in the heart of the Big Apple's financial district.

"I'm going to show you a toxic asset," he tells a small group of curious tourists. "You can even touch it."

Comerford, a graphics employee at Goldman Sachs who leads guided walks in his spare time, gets out the front page of an inch-thick legal document that comprised a $1.5bn collateralised debt obligation, issued in 2006. The derivative, granted a triple-A rating for its top tranches by credit agencies, went spectacularly sour, with investors losing 80 cents in every dollar. He explains: "The collateral for this deal was sub-prime mortgages or, as we know it today, crap."

As financial turbulence grinds on and the global economy stutters towards a half-hearted recovery, a cottage industry has sprung up in "credit crunch tourism". At least two companies have set up financial crisis tours of New York's financial district, while the Museum of American Finance is drawing a steady stream of visitors for its new exhibition on Wall Street scandal.

Comerford runs tours for The Wall Street Experience, a business set up last year by a former Deutsche Bank bond trader, Andrew Luan, to capitalise on public fascination with the financial industry's villainous excesses. Tourists get to gawp at AIG's head office, the original Lehman Brothers building, Standard & Poor's credit rating tower block and New York's Federal Reserve – all to a running commentary of anecdotes about bankers' excesses.

In an alleyway outside AIG, Comerford pauses to explain the size of the insurance company's taxpayer-funded bail-out. A million dollars in $100 bills, he says, could just about fit into his shoulder bag. But the $185bn received by AIG would fill the entire alley to a height of six feet.

There's a murmur of outrage from the assembled group. Kathleen Maher, a tele-conferencing executive from Montreal, is unimpressed: "When you say Wall Street, the first word that comes to my mind is 'greed'."

For all the wrong reasons, the credit crunch has put finance on the agenda for many tourists visiting the Big Apple. Annaline Dinkelmann, a former IT worker at Morgan Stanley, runs a rival operation, Wall Street Walks, which this month began a tour called "scandals and scoundrels of Wall Street" that runs from 18th-century speculator William Duer to the collapse of Enron and the arrest of Bernard Madoff.

"My most frequently asked question is, will we see Goldman Sachs?" Dinkelmann says. "They haven't been found guilty so they're not a scandal yet."

She adds that as Americans have seen their savings and pension funds dwindle in wilting markets, interest in Wall Street has picked up: "There's a curiousity – a willingness to learn about what's happened."

The gift shop at the Museum of American Finance sells posters illustrating key events in the credit crunch. Deputy director Kristin Aguilera says visitors have been keen for details: "People were coming in and wanting to hear much more about the current crisis. We've been updating our exhibits every few months to keep people informed of what's going on."

New York's tourism authority, NYC & Company, suggests that a day of immersion in the credit crunch could be topped off with a drink at the Exchange Bar and Grill, a new establishment in Gramercy Park co-founded by a former Wall Street trader. The cost of food and drinks here is set by an in-house stock market. Prices, displayed on a digital ticker, tick up and down in 25-cent increments according to demand.

Not everybody is interested in immersion in the fine details of high finance. One of the most popular tourist stop-offs in downtown Manhattan is Arturo di Modica's famous statue of a charging bull, which sits in Bowling Green Park, ironically just in front of the city's bankruptcy court. On a typical morning last week, dozens of visitors were jostling to have their picture taken astride, or alongside, the bull. A popular pose is from the rear, with tourists crouching next to the beast's melon-sized testicles.

Back on his walking tour, Comerford points to Goldman Sachs' old office block on Broad Street, which never had much of a sign outside: ‚"There was no insignia on it. If you didn't know what this building was, you didn't deserve to be here."

In front of Deutsche Bank, he tells of raucous bonding activity among employees: "They have competitions on the trading floor to see who can eat the most cheeseburgers in five minutes, or who can lose the most weight in a week."

Gwen Phanijphand, a PhD student showing her parents around New York, was stung into sarcasm: "It's great to know the people handling these CDOs are so goal-orientated."

She offered a measured criticism of financial professionals: "I wouldn't say they're stupid but maybe they think they're a little bit invincible. There are a few too many type-A personalities. A little bit of arrogance."